Before The Fall by Noah Hawley

Read If You Are: Looking for an easy to read thriller with a great plot, weekend read!

A private plane taking off from Martha’s Vineyard on its way to New York crashes into the sea. Out of the 11 passengers, only two survive – a down on his luck (and life) painter and a four-year-old boy. The dead include the head of one of the biggest media agencies in America (think: Fox News), a Wall Street big wig and their families. This is BIG news!

The book focuses on uncovering how the crash happened. Whose fault was it? Was it a tech problem? Was it deliberate? But it also focuses on more than the crash – on relationships between people – the platonic and not so platonic, ethics, careers, the ‘sensationalisation’ of the media, so much more.

I loved how the author weaved the storyline through the interpretation and the eyes of the various characters. The final moments were told through the eyes of pretty much everyone in the plane. But it wasn’t just that. The book flashbacks to the past and the ‘insignificant details’. You got an idea of who these people were and where they came from. They were real and raw – it wasn’t just black and white. It was grey.

This was a book I just did not want to keep down. I thought I knew what was happening, but I really wasn’t sure. I wanted to continue reading, find out what happened. A thriller at its best! The ending was a bit disappointing, but that doesn’t take away from the overall experience.

A true winner, this one! Definitely one of my favourites and much recommended.

Favourite Quotes:

“Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you. And then it’s over.”

“This was the hubris of mankind, to rally in the face of overwhelming odds, to thread the needle and climb the mountain and survive the storm.”

“Life is made of these moments – of one’s physical being moving through time and space – and we string them together into a story, and that story becomes our life.”

“Never fight tomorrow’s fight today.”

“Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.”

“In the absence of facts…. we tell ourselves stories.”

“Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.”